


The Dull Backwaters of the Art of Killing

by TheLionInMyBed



Category: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Dagor Bragollach, Deeds of surpassing valour, Gen, Swordfighting, battles, the working title was 'Clinically Depressed Castle Defence Sim'
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-12
Updated: 2019-12-12
Packaged: 2021-02-25 22:49:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,985
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21773236
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheLionInMyBed/pseuds/TheLionInMyBed
Summary: Deeds of surpassing valour are done. They're mostly a matter of logistics.
Comments: 36
Kudos: 163





	The Dull Backwaters of the Art of Killing

**Author's Note:**

> Another Maedhros-centric story commissioned by the kindest and most generous of souls, all love and balrogs to them.

War was hard. 

War was strategy and supply lines. War was waiting and watching, wondering if your fortifications would hold; if you had enough food in your storerooms and weapons in your armoury; if there were enough horses in your paddocks and soldiers to ride them. War was two hundred years of sorties and patrols while your nerves frayed to threads and your vassals chafed at taxes for defences against an enemy their fathers had forgotten. War was generations of Men living and dying in the shadow of your walls and the longer shadow of Thangorodrim. 

Killing, though. That had always been easy. 

When smoke and flame bruised the horizon black and purple, the first thing that Maedhros felt was relief. 

His brothers and cousins’ holdings lay beyond that horizon, within those flames, and so the next thing that he felt was guilt. And then, through long practice, he felt nothing at all. 

“Send riders to the Gap, and the Pass of Aglon,” he said, pacing the length of Himring’s walls. Some wag had named the hillfort cold twice over, but now the air was still and warm as a summer beneath the Trees, smelling like a forge. It deadened sound and Maedhros pitched his voice louder for the soldiers and stewards following like ducklings at his heels. “And birds to Tol Sirion and Nargothrond, to all the strongholds of our people and the Men of Dor-lómin. And one to Barad Eithel.”

“The message, Lord?” 

“Tell the High King I owe him two casks of our best brandy - I bet him that we had another fifty years before Morgoth had the balls to try us again.” 

The soldier laughed, some little of the fear gone out of her, and hurried away to the aviary.

“How long can we hold?” said another. The man had his helmet tucked beneath his arm, lulled by long years of peace, and Maedhros glared until the man blanched and donned it. 

“Until the High King has slept off his hangover,” Maedhros said, calculating as he had calculated so many times before. But he knew the awful ingenuity of Morgoth’s lieutenants and knew better than to think it would come down to their stores. “Until long after the Enemy has broken himself upon our walls. 

He had learned to lead from his father, for good or ill and knew that if you were certain, it scarcely mattered what you were certain _of_. People would let the flame of that surety guide them through all manner of horror. Even now, Maedhros did not know if Fëanor had been certain when he drew that final oath from them, but it scarcely mattered. He had asked and they had sworn. Maedhros was not certain now, as the sky burned and the dry winter grasses smoked like tinder beneath their walls, but he could tell a lie and make them believe it, and that was worth almost as much. 

“What will come?” whispered someone - a Man too young to have cut down either enemies on the field or hairs on his own chin. 

Maedhros clapped his shoulder, with the flesh hand and not the steel. “Salamanders, weasels and inbred wolves.” There was nothing fearsome about a weasel until you saw it snap a soldier’s neck like a rabbit’s. “But the Enemy is ever-inventive. Prepare yourselves for giant blindworms and armoured frogs.”

That inventiveness was a mercy. The first orcs had been elves in all but mind, but as the bodies of their foes had twisted into nightmares, the killing of them had ceased to give the Noldor any pause. Or perhaps they’d all become too acquainted with butchery. 

“When the Enemy’s wyrm came slithering out of the North, we sent it back to him full of arrows, did we not?” he said. 

“Fingon did,” said Nadhorhel at the back, crouching down as though he would not see her. 

“Fingolfin’s son.” Maedhros offered Fingon a silent apology. “And _we_ are of a greater house. Let Morgoth remember that the Noldor are as inventive as he; let him send ten dragons and we shall send him back ten pincushions. Our walls are strong, and our valour undaunted. Whatever force he sends will break like waves upon a rock. There is nothing to fear.” 

Tell a lie often, tell it well, and people would believe it. 

* * *

Maglor arrived with the dawn, bent over his saddle with the sorry remnants of his army following at his horse’s heels. And at his army’s heels came flame. 

“The dragon,” someone said, as they stood upon the ramparts, watching the oily gleam of flames upon a hundred orcish blades. 

“A balrog,” said Orchalion, who had been with them when Fëanor fell. 

“Only one,” said scarred Fâneth, who’d taken a spear to the face at Alqualondë.

“Isn’t one enough?”

“What happened to the weasels? I was looking to make a winter cloak,” said Gwerion, who thought that he was funny. 

“They won’t make it.”

They wouldn’t. Their horses were spent and staggering.

“My lord? What shall we do?”

Not many of Maglor’s cavalry left - a few score - and riding out to meet them would cost soldiers Maedhros could ill-afford to lose. But watching them cut down in sight of their walls would wreak havoc on morale. They would have intelligence on the enemy. They were sworn to the service of his house and had followed through betrayal after betrayal. 

And it was his younger brother out there, bent and bloodied with a demon upon his heels. 

“Orchalion,” he said. “Your archers will cover us from the walls. Iacheth, hold position atop the dam and wait for my signal. You all know what to do. We ride out to bring them in.”

A cheer rose with their banners, ragged about the edges but a cheer nonetheless. It followed them down from the walls and into the courtyard where their horses milled and pawed at the cobbles, steaming in the cold. 

Maedhros had learned from Fëanor’s death and his own imprisonment. Leading from the front was a risk. Leading from the front into a balrog’s maw was sheer idiocy to anyone with more sense than the house of Finwë. It could be a trap, baited with a brother this time and not a jewel, and Maedhros clenched his fist against the warnings of a voice that was either pragmatism or cowardice. 

Better to think on the peace left by the rush of battle, when it washed away all fear and pain and grief was better than watching from the walls as his soldiers died beneath him. 

And death was a peace all of its own. 

Maedhros swung himself into the saddle and Achariel shifted under him, iron-shod hooves striking sparks against the cobbles. 

The gates were Curufin’s design and raised without a sound. The belch of hot air that issued forth was like opening the door to a stove, and before he could second guess himself, Maedhros gave Achariel her head and rode into the heat. 

Lothlann was an empty plain over which infantry might march and wolves could run a man to ground if the flames didn’t find him first, and Maedhros halted before Himring’s mounded hills gave way to scorched grass. The rangy goats that made their home in them had been herded to safety but the slopes were alive with the gurgling of the streams feeding the pool they’d caged behind a dam. Fresh water was a precious thing in times of siege, and the jewel-scaled fish it housed more valuable than diamonds.

Here was where they waited; where the narrow gully beneath the dam would give the orcish formation no choice but to break, where they would be funnelled into the sights of the archers perched atop the wall. Where there would be high ground enough to stand level with a balrog and drive a sword into its face. 

Maglor’s cavalry passed them by like ghosts, insubstantial in the twilight that the beast had made of morning. Smoke muffled the sound of their horses’ hooves upon the sod, the shrill of their horn and the answering shrieks of the orcs. Only the crackle of the balrog’s fires was loud. 

Fight a rearguard action. Save what could be saved. That was how you won a war.

But killing had always been easier than winning, and as the first wolves drew close, Maedhros put his heels to Achariel so that she reared and danced and dashed a warg’s brains from its skull. Draw them in and call it courage if you liked.

A spear jabbed for his face and Maedhros batted it aside with his steel hand, dropping a heavy blow onto the owner’s head in fair exchange. The orc half dodged, and his sword caught it in the shoulder, splintering bone and knocking it to the ground. Not dead, but he felt Achariel stamp down on something soft. Another orc, and he met this one’s wild swing before it could take Achariel’s legs out from under her. 

Already his arm ached from the jarring thunk of blade on steel and meat. Claws tore open his thigh, where the mail did not cover, and it was a relief. Not the pain, which he would not feel for hours yet, but the simplicity. Let instinct take over, move a piece of metal from one place to another, no time for fear, no time to think on plans and failure because if you stopped you died. Feel your breath burn in your chest and know that hadn’t happened yet. Clawed hands caught at his leg, dragged him from the saddle and he angled the fall to land with his full weight atop them. Brought his steel hand, unseeing, down upon its head until the arms about him went limp and he could drag himself afoot. There was space around him now, and wariness in the faces of the orcs where they had face enough to show it. 

He wondered at his own expression, beneath the mud and gore. 

Beyond the circle of blades, swords clashed, men screamed, and always beneath was the roaring of flame, drawing ever closer. The orcs that had surrounded him stepped back, feet scuffing nervously over corpses as the balrog stepped from the smoke. 

It was less like a man than a forest fire, for all it walked upon two legs. Its whip spiralled lazily in the air above their heads, cutting the sky to pieces, and the shadows draped its form like a cloak. It was awful but less awful by far than its master, and it was that alone that let him keep his feet while around him, soldiers cried out or fell upon their faces. 

“It’s been some time,” he told it in a voice that was half a croak. Centuries since it had stood over his father’s broken body. Centuries since it had stood over his own. 

“Centuries, in which you have not learned.” Its voice was the roar of a furnace. 

Maedhros backed up one step then two, keeping the weight off his injured leg. It was close, but he would take no chances. 

It was slow - it was shadow and terror with no need to be fast - and he saw it raise its arm in an overhead strike that would split him in two. Inevitable as the sluggish seep of lava, but as readily channelled if you knew how. He stood beneath the blade, raising his own so that the sword slid along it and away and the balrog lurched, unbalanced. 

Not harmlessly. Sparks stung his cheeks, pain flared down his arm, and his sword glowed fever-bright with heat. 

Maedhros took the force it had leant him, flipped the blade, and buried it deep in the monster’s knee. It was a clumsy blow that left him off balance and would’ve made his old tutors shake their heads, but the beast still roared with pain or peevishness.

Balrogs could not be killed. They could, however, be severely inconvenienced. They formed bodies for themselves, and bodies had joints, and joints- 

-Could break. 

The blow it gave him in return - a lazy swat - knocked him from his feet again to fall ten yards away. Bruises atop broken ribs and all the air knocked from him. He choked on his next breath and coughed out a mist of blood. Even that glancing strike had heated his hauberk so hot he could feel the scorch of it through the thick wool of his gambeson. 

Maedhros blinked the blur from his eyes and glanced about, desperate now; he could not hope to hold it. When his vision cleared it was to see the last of his soldiers vanishing back up the gully. 

The balrog watched them go. “You truly have not learned,” it repeated, a teacher chiding a slow student.

Maedhros dragged himself a few feet up the cleft’s side, over the soft heap of a body too muddy to be clearly elf or orc. The balrog watched him do it, its weight upon its uninjured leg. The other jutted awkwardly, the white heat of its body gleaming through. Those of its orcs that could rose to their feet and finished off those that couldn’t. It would send them after him, soon enough, or its leg would mend enough to come itself. 

There was a tree clinging to the slope, too stunted to determine species and Maedhros wrapped numb arms around it, cleaving tight as the shackle once had to his wrist. 

“You won’t die here,” the balrog rumbled. The most awful threat that it could make. 

If he’d had the breath to be witty, he might have told it he’d learned more than a little of traps by now. He didn’t; it was all he could do to raise his hand in the signal Iacheth had been waiting for, perched high above them on the dam. 

The sluice gates opened. 

The water’s roar drowned out the balrog’s. 

* * *

“You should be dead,” Fileg said when Maedhros sloshed through Himring’s gates leaving a trail of mud behind him. The last of the balrog’s heat had kept the chill at bay a while, but Himring was well named and he was shivering in earnest when he came upon Maglor and his men, slumped upon the courtyard floor, lying where they’d dismounted. 

“You _look_ dead,” said Gwerion.

“I feel it too.” Maedhros resisted the urge to list into a wall. “Go check my horse hasn’t drowned.”

“Did we kill it?” said the beardless boy from the walls.

“We’ve bought some time while it licks his wounds. Maglor, what else did he set against you?”

The parts of his brother’s face that weren’t black with ash were raw with burns and his eyes were dull with weariness. “Dragon,” he wheezed through a smoke-scoured throat. “They sent a dragon, with many balrogs behind it, and more orcs than you’ve ever seen.”

Maedhros gestured for water. “A dragon more fearsome, I assume, than the one Fingon ran off.”

His steward handed off a ewer and Maglor drank straight from it, water spilling from the sides to carve pale paths in the grime that streaked his throat. “The same, I think - Fingon boasted he put an arrow in its eyelid and this one bears the scar. But it is not as he described it. It is vast, vast as hunger, and its flames ate up my cavalry, like paper dolls tossed in a forge. They burned around us and we galloped through their ashes. The balrog was nothing to it.” Maglor coughed and the cough turned into a hack as he spat black bile onto the courtyard’s cobbles. “That is my lieutenant,” he murmured. “We must bury him with honour.”

That would sour the sweetness of any victory, and the broken ribs had already taken much of the joy from this one. 

“But first, to bed,” Maedhros told him, dragging him up and then half-falling against him as his leg protested. “Fileg, find a pretty vase he can retch into. Daerphen, soak the thatch on every building that has it. Tuluspen, we need barrels of sand at every crossway.”

The war went on.

* * *

The messages piled up upon his desk, crisp as autumn leaves, blackened at the edges. Dorthonion, fallen. Aglon, breached. Rerir and Helevorn, seized. Thargelion, ravaged, and Gelion overrun. Their dead piled up as well; a scrawled message from a captain written as the orcs broke down the doors told that the sharp flame burned no more. Angrod, dead. No word from three of Maedhros’ brothers, and he would not dwell on if they were dead or captured. Hador, dead. Orodreth, besieged. Fingolfin, dead. 

That one was a harder blow than he’d expected. Maedhros tried to picture his uncle - counsellor and conciliator and king - riding screaming to his death. Clearly Fëanor had more in common with Fingolin than he’d ever realised. 

Fingon would take it hard. 

If he was still alive.

Maglor took the message from Maedhros’ unresisting hand and read it through. “The crown is yours, then,” he said solemnly with, perhaps, a bard’s relish beneath the grief. 

“And the brandy.”

“What?”

Maedhros shook his head. “Nothing. I won’t do that to Fingon.”

“I’d wager that letting him keep it is far crueller.”

“The infighting would start up again. We cannot risk that now- Why are we even debating it?” Curufin and Caranthir would want to, endlessly, circuitously. Their spectres stood beside them in the solar, breathing cool upon their necks. 

From Maglor’s face, he felt the heavy presence of their absence too. “I’d rather dwell on politics than the particulars of our situation, which should tell you how grim things have become. Can we hold the border?”

The room was crowded with ghosts and Maedhros pressed the heel of his palm against his eye to dispel them. “No more than we can reclaim the silmarils. Does it matter? We’ll do it all the same.”


End file.
